18 MARCH 2020
As countries around the world continued to shut down. ……
What does quarantine mean?
DEFINITION
Quarantine is a state or place of isolation for a person or animal who may have come in contact with contagious diseases. The period of isolation lowers the chance that person or animal could transfer illnesses to others.
Quarantine isn’t reserved for sick people only. People who appear healthy could spread a pathogen without ever knowing they were carriers, which is why travelers who appear healthy may still be quarantined, depending on where they are visiting from.
List of quarantinable diseases: cholera, diphtheria, infectious tuberculosis, plague, smallpox, yellow fever, viral hemorrhagic fevers (such as Marburg, Ebola, and Congo-Crimean), and severe acute respiratory syndromes.
History of Quarantine
The practice of quarantine, as we know it, began during the 14th century- Middle Ages- in an effort to protect coastal cities from plague epidemics. Ships arriving in Venice from infected ports were required to sit at anchor for 40 days before landing. This practice, called quarantine, was derived from the Italian words quaranta giorni which mean 40 days.
VISIT THE FOLLOWING LINK AND WATCH THE VIDEO TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT QUARANTINE
https://www.livescience.com/quarantine.html?jwsource=cl
From The Black Death, The Birth Of Quarantine
In 1793, yellow fever hit Philadelphia, and sailors were quarantined in a hospital outside the city. When typhus landed in New York City in 1892, at least 70 people were quarantined on a nearby island. When an outbreak of SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) moved through Canada in 2003, about 30,000 people in Toronto were quarantined. And during the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa, health workers returning to the United States from affected areas were quarantined.
Poster of a typhoid carrier infecting food. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
But to find the origin of the word, we have to look back to mid-14th century Europe.
At the time, the bubonic plague, infamously known as the Black Death, was ripping through the continent. Starting in 1343, the disease wiped out an estimated one-third of Europe’s population during a particularly nasty period of three years between 1347-50. This sweep of the plague resulted in one of the biggest die-offs in human history—and it was an impetus to take action.
Officials in the Venetian-controlled port city of Ragusa (now Dubrovnik, Croatia) passed a law establishing trentino, or a 30-day period of isolation for ships arriving from plague-affected areas. No one from Ragusa was allowed to visit those ships under trentino, and if someone broke the law, they too would be isolated for the mandatory 30 days. The law caught on. Over the next 80 years, Marseilles, Pisa, and various other cities adopted similar measures.
Within a century, cities extended the isolation period from 30 to 40 days, and the term changed from trentino to quarantino—the root of the English word quarantine that we use today.
Did you know?
When Shakespeare was quarantined because of the plague, he wrote King Lear.